There's a YouTube channel, "Wings of Pegasus" that does a lot of breakdowns of recordings, isolating voices and instruments and analyzing what kind of processing has been done on them.
They had a video a few months ago [1] looking at two performances from the 2024 Glastonbury Festival. One from an '80s artist (Cyndi Lauper) and one from a current artist (Dua Lipa).
Lauper's live performance was the kind you'd expect from an '80s act. What the audience heard was what she was singing live and what the musicians on stage were playing.
During Lipa's performance most of the time what they audience was hearing was Lipa's vocals from the studio recording. She was singing live but most of the time they had her microphone turned way down in the mix. They'd only turn it up and the recording down for a few passages. Same with the musicians. There was a drummer on stage but mostly to accompany the studio recording.
The thing is Lipa's fans are OK with that. They aren't there to hear what she sounds like live. The extras they get at a live show over just listening to the recording are the experience of the crowd and watching the dancing and light show.
Contrast to the '80s and '90s where one of the points of going to a concert was that the bands tried different things with their songs. They didn't just play note for note and beat for beat the studio version. Live versions might have more solos, or a different solo, or different instrumentation, or variations on the lyrics (or even new verses). The live performances were different enough that people would buy live albums even though they had every song from the live album on studio albums they already owned.
It's an interesting change, and I'm not sure why it happened. I speculate that it may be due to the increased sophistication of the processing that can be done in a studio. If every tiny imperfection gets processed away in the studio so that all people are hearing is 100% on pitch with 100% perfect timing maybe the imperfections of a true live performance would sound bad to them?
